LOS ANGELES — When a gunman opened fire Friday at a security checkpoint at Los Angeles International Airport, many travelers wondered how it could happen at such a closely guarded facility. But many security consultants thought differently. They questionedwhy shooters don’t enter airport public areas more often.

“When you have so many people concentrated in one place, you are going to have a high probability of an unlikely event,” said Harvey Molotch, a professor at New York University and author of “Against Security — How We Go Wrong at Airports, Subways and Other Sites of Ambiguous Danger.”

“This was very mild compared to what happened in the past and what could happen. Anyone could mow people down in a shopping mall with a car, or put a bomb in a department store. There are so many ways of creating mayhem. It’s all a testimony to how routinely safe and secure we are in the United States.”

LAX officials outlined plans Saturday to provide extra police presence, but experts questioned whether any security efforts could deter a lone gunman on a mission. So many elements of airport security, they say, are designed to ensure no one enters an airplane with a gun or a bomb. But on the other side of security screening, in ticketing lobbies and near checkpoints, airports are not much different from schools, movie theaters and nightclubs.

Advertisement

It is difficult to keep a shooter from firing the first rounds. The key, experts say, is to neutralize the intruder quickly. By most accounts, that happened Friday, with airport police locating the gunman within seconds and chasing him through the terminal. Officers eventually shot and wounded him.

Experts say it is important not to overreact. Many insist it’s not prudent to arm Transportation Security Administration employees, and they say moving security checkpoints farther from airplanes likely is not necessary. Experts also say airport security could become more thorough, but that passengers probably would not accept the inconvenience.

All experts interviewed for this article said a scenario like the one that unfolded Friday could happen again.

“That’s one of the unfortunate aspects of aviation security,” said Richard Bloom, a former U.S. intelligence operations manager and now a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. “Even when you do everything right, something can still happen. What you try to do is minimize the probability.”

Jeff Price, former assistant security director at Denver International Airport, has a concealed weapons permit and said he is skilled with a weapon. But he said the risks of giving TSA screeners guns — even if just some of them receive them — probably outweigh the potential rewards.

“Up until now, there hasn’t been an incident when someone was killed,” said Price, now a professor at Metropolitan State College of Denver. “From a risk management standpoint, there wasn’t a need for it. But now let’s play it out. Let’s say you’ve now got 35 transportation security officers trying to pull out their guns and shoot this guy. If you want to hand someone a gun, you have to be very careful.”

Price said one concern with arming officers is the confined and chaotic area in which they work. “How easy would it be for someone to grab my weapon in a very crowded environment?” he said.

Bloom said one approach, short of providing weapons, might be to improve TSA morale and training. In doing so, he said, the officers may feel as if they have more authority. Price also said they could be trained in self-defense.

“Are we paying them enough?” Bloom said. “Are we training them enough? Does that kind of position have as much prestige as it should. If all you have is a rent-a-cop, you’re probably going to get performance related to being a rent-a-cop.”

What is more likely, because of Friday, is that airport police may return to sitting in a booth at each LAX security checkpoint. Recently, the airport began allowing officers who were once stationed at checkpoints to roam, a senior law enforcement official said, because authorities believed they could be more effective if they patrolled the entire terminal. Overall, police staffing remained the same, the official said.

That approach gave officers more freedom to walk through ticketing lobbies, which was where the last violent attack at LAX occurred. In 2002, a man opened fire at the ticket counter for El Al, the Israeli airline.

At some airports, passengers enter security twice. First, they go through detection at the front door of the terminal. Then they do so again to reach gates.

But security experts say that’s not a feasible approach here. And they insist it would merely move the threat to another place, like the upper roadway at LAX.

One security expert employed by a major European airline said in an email that officials have long been concerned about the possibility of a major terrorist attack on the “landside,” or the part of an airport outside security screening. Another security expert called this area the “soft belly” of an airport.

“Authorities across the world are concerned about the possibility of landside attacks at airports because they get close to attacking one of al-Qaeda’s preferred targets — aviation — without having to go through security,” said the official, who was not authorized by his airline to speak publicly.

“And an attack at an airport may well hit tourists and therefore damage tourism. Some airports screen the public entering terminals, or otherwise restrict access, but this is not really a practical option at busy airports with multiple entrances.”

Airports with multiple levels of security screening are generally in less developed countries, said Narayanan Srinivasan, professor of security and risk at Edith Cowan University in Australia. The system can make traveling especially inconvenient.

“This happens in countries where threats are high like Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and in many countries in Africa and South America,” Srinivasan said in an email. “In some countries such as India, visitors and non-traveling public are not allowed in the lobby areas unless they pay a fee, thus attracting attention. In Sri Lanka during the height of their civil war, passengers were bused from about 15 kilometers away from the check-in areas after intensive screening for explosives and guns.”

Israel is commonly considered to have the most thorough airport security screening procedures in the world, but most experts say the Israeli model would not work in the United States.

The Israelis take into account a possible breach of ticketing lobbies and checkpoints, with intelligence officials constantly scanning areas and looking for “bad guys,” said Avi Kirschenbaum, a professor at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, in an email.

El Al, the Israeli airline, also employs extra security officers at LAX, and officials often pester travelers with questions about why they’re traveling. The questions can be intrusive, some say.

But Kirschenbaum said the country’s model probably cannot work elsewhere.

“Airport authorities — due to the high costs that security imposes on airport financial resources — have a disincentive to add additional security measures that will increase these costs if they are not required,” he said. “They are also cognizant that passenger flow is a vital key to their financial health, and putting additional security points along the way slows down through-put and thereby increases security-related costs.”

Molotch, the NYU professor, said he agrees ­the Israeli model can’t be duplicated here, though for other reasons. Among them, the country is small, with about 8 million residents.

“Israel is a heavily militarized society,” he said. “It is also a very simple society. A vast majority of population — Jews — is trusted prima facie. So Israel, which is often thought of as the model, is not the model for a heterogeneous society like ours.”

That likely means American airport security will remain as it is now, Molotch and others said. In the short term, U.S. airports might deploy more police to checkpoints and lobbies. But it will be almost impossible to protect against a similar attack in the future.

“There are a constant series of events carried out by berserk people in this country and in many countries,” Molotch said. “There is no real rhyme or reason. As long as that’s around, it’s a problem.”